Pessoptimism

Middle East revolutions

Even after a month of demonstrations in Tunisia had brought about the downfall of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, on January 14th, some White House officials, along with American and Israeli intelligence experts, put the likelihood of a copycat revolution in Egypt at no more than twenty per cent. The hundred and twenty-five million dollars’ worth of algorithmic computer modelling that American military and intelligence agencies had ordered over the previous three years to forecast global political unrest didn’t seem to be of much help, either. “All of our models are bad, some are less bad than others,” Mark Abdollahian, who has been a consultant on power transitions for the U.S. government, told Wired. Even the Facebook activists who organized the first day of protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square didn’t expect more than a few thousand people to show up. Since then, the protests have spread to Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, Iraq, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, and, most recently, Oman, and they are still confounding the paradigms and the pundits.

In recent days, demonstrations in several Middle East capitals haven’t even made the front pages. The world has been transfixed by Libya and the preposterous yet lethal spectacle of Muammar el-Qaddafi wearing a turban and a flowing robe, brandishing an umbrella, and declaring his country to be in the grip of American and Al Qaeda terrorists high on hallucinogens, as he sends war planes to bomb his rebel countrymen. About two hundred thousand guest workers have fled the country and many are stuck in makeshift camps in Tunisia and Egypt; oil prices are spiking; and the United States and its European allies are wondering if it’s politically and logistically feasible to institute a no-fly zone. After the euphoria of Tunisia and Egypt, Qaddafi’s defiance provides a reminder that revolutions are often bloody and uncertain for their duration, and that what comes after is even harder to divine.

Within the past ten days, in both Tunisia and Egypt, continuing protests pushed the interim Prime Ministers and other cabinet members to resign. Last week, an Egyptian activist said that he was worried about the Army’s recalcitrance. “I’m increasingly pessoptimistic,” he said, echoing the title of a satirical novel from 1974, “The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist,” by Emile Habiby, an Arab-Israeli writer who served in the Knesset for nineteen years. Hisham Kassem, a well-known former independent Egyptian newspaper publisher and human-rights activist, was more hopeful. Though two and a half years ago in Egypt bread-price riots and protests against government harassment led by lawyers, doctors, and journalists fizzled, Kassem felt at the time that something was shifting, that anything could happen. “Now I think we’ll go through a bit of turmoil but nothing serious,” he said.

The risks of revolution—instability, civil strife, military rule, radical Islamism, partition—remain. The protests have been essentially leaderless—thrilling and effective, but diffuse in their direction. Decades of political repression have not fostered a political class that can easily step into the vacuum. In Tahrir Square, people were relatively uninterested in who the next President might be; more important was the idea that whoever it was could not be imposed upon them, and that he could, once in office, be voted out again. The examples of democracy that exist in the Arab world—Lebanon, which is unstable and sectarian, and Iraq, which is even more so—have not inspired much confidence. Still, despite the varying subplots, there is a unifying story: altogether and all at once, Arabs have lost their fear. And not just the fear of violence, imprisonment, and death (witness the Libyan resistance). They have also lost the fear of the insidious inculcation that they, as Arabs—the inheritors of imperial overlords, dropped-in monarchs, military coups, and strongmen—are inherently ill suited to representative government; that they are, as Omar Suleiman, briefly the Vice-President of Egypt, told his countrymen just a few days before the regime fell, “not ready for democracy.”

At the heart of the complaints among the protesters—more than poverty and unemployment and low wages—is the sense that the pervasive corruption of wasta, or connections, must end. People are asking for better governance and accountability. Each Arab nation has its own permutations of a balance of power among tribe, sect, mosque, and military. The most striking and unexpected aspect of the protests is that none of these entities have been at the forefront. Extremism has also been missing. There’s been little talk of jihad, caliphates, or Osama bin Laden. It’s as if Al Qaeda had been suddenly rendered as anachronistic as dictatorial whim and official State Department Middle East policy. It is tempting to see a kind of new pan-Arabism, one that is based not on dictators shaking hands and then whispering plots behind each other’s back but on shared aspirations. Last Wednesday, before the Egyptian Prime Minister, Ahmed Shafik, resigned, he was taken to task by journalists and opposition personalities in a debate televised on an independent satellite channel. He was combative and uncomfortable, but, for the first time that anyone could remember, an Arab leader had to answer difficult questions from fellow-citizens. Faced with a call for a million-man march to demand his ouster, Shafik left office the next day.

Governments are scrambling to keep up. In the past couple of weeks alone, Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces apologized after some protesters had been roughed up in Tahrir Square. King Abdullah of Jordan; President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria; and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who, in 2000, on the death of his father, took over the Presidency in an unopposed referendum, have continued their efforts to preëmpt trouble by talking the language of reform. In Morocco, the monarchy almost doubled its subsidies for staple foods and cooking gas. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who is hosting Ben Ali in exile, announced a thirty-six-billion-dollar giveaway in benefits to poor and middle-income families.

The idea that Arab governments should respond to their citizens instead of ruling them is almost unprecedented. The people of the Middle East, like Emile Habiby’s tragicomic hero Saeed the Pessoptimist, have been subject to the vicissitudes of their history: occupation, empire, emir. Saeed resists the lures of both optimism and pessimism. He is a kind of Arab Candide, and his story is ultimately one of failure and passivity. But it also suggests that, in an unpredictable world, anything can happen. Maybe, for once, the outcome can be empowerment—and even something like success. ♦